BY AILEEN GRAEF
UNITED PRESS
Formula One President Max Mosley is taking Google to the High Court in London over the publishing of pictures of him at a sex party.
Mosley claims the firm violated the Data Protection Act by publishing the pictures which were first published in the now-defunct News of the World tabloid.
The pictures showed Mosley engaging in sadomasochistic sex acts with prostitutes in an apartment in Chelsea. Mosley, the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, won a £60,000 ($91,165) lawsuit for damages after the paper falsely accused him of participating in a “sick Nazi orgy.”
Mosley is claiming, under the “Right to be Forgotten” ruling in Europe last year, the images should be removed from the search engine.
“Google should operate within the law rather than according to rules it makes itself. It cannot be allowed to ignore judgments in our courts,” Mosley said when he launched the action last year.
Google has maintained they are not a publisher and not responsible for policing the Internet. They have agreed to remove the URLs they are alerted to but will not remove the images entirely from their search engines.
“We don’t know how [Mosley’s] privacy was somehow regained. There’s no continuing reasonable expectation of privacy; everyone is now free to publish,” said Google’s lawyer Antony White.
The photographs were viewed by 435,000 people and 1.5 million had seen the video footage immediately after publication. As White said, the “dam has effectively burst.”